Adobe announces Open Screen Project to further drive Flash Player ubiquity

[Mrinal Wadhwa]

Guys this is a very BIG announcement so I thought I'll share it here .. Adobe today announced the open screen project in collaboration with several partners with the aim of increasing the ubiquity of flash player.

The four major immediate steps are ...

Removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications

Although these were already published all licensing restrictions have been removed

Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player

This is simply awesome because it essentially means that you could invent your own device and port flash player to it .. and so could all the existing devices

Publishing the Adobe Flash® Cast™ protocol and the AMF protocol for robust data services

AMF was already published a few months ago, the FlashCast protocol for mobile will also be published now.  

Removing licensing fees – making next major releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices free

Unlike Flash Lite today the future versions will not have any licensing/royalty fee for putting Flash and AIR on a device

All in all this will ensure that flash is available on all devices and we can write applications that run everywhere .. read more here .. 

http://weblog.mrinalwadhwa.com/2008/05/01/adobe-announces-open-screen-project-to-further-drive-flash-player-ubiquity/

_

Mrinal

http://weblog.mrinalwadhwa.com

[Dharmendra Tolani]

Thanks Mrinal, for translating the news :-), I had read the news but wasn't quite clear as to
what did it mean.
Still, I understood two of these, and didn't understand the rest two :

Removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications

Although these were already published all licensing restrictions have been removed

Which licensing restrictions have been removed? I mean there are free S/W which
can play flv files, for e.g. VLC, and ffmpeg can convert almost every file to flv format.
could you please elaborate?

 

Publishing the Adobe Flash® Cast(tm) protocol and the AMF protocol for robust data services

[Mrinal Wadhwa]

Since the swf format has been published for a while there are players out there that can play SWF but all such players earlier needed to get Adobe's permission and a license to do so .. now they dont.

AMF (actionscript messaging format) is a binary data transfer protocol that is natively understood by flash player, but any transfer between flash player and a server requires a server that understands AMF .. AMF is a lot smaller and hence faster that most common data formats but since it was not open .. no one else but adobe could write and AMF server (aka remoting server) .. a few months ago adobe opened up AMF along with the release of open source BlazeDS (a reference AMF server implementation) 

I dont know a lot about Flash cast but apparently it is this really neat protocol to send data to mobile over slow phone networks, this was also a closed protocol and now adobe has announced to open it.

Check out my blog post and Kevin Lynch's video .. it will help you understand things better.

Thank you,

Mrinal

http://weblog.mrinalwadhwa.com

[saurabh narula]

this is damn exciting!!!!!
sometime back i was just wondering how would that be to have a same RIA app be running on a pc to actually behave in a same fashion on a touch screen or a kiosk system, how would that experience be!!
and here comes the open screen project!!!..its really exciting..in a sense that you write your app..on your desktop..n deploy it on you any device..any smart device so to speak and see you app runnin there..though one needs to be very careful about the usability aspects of the RIA..if the app produce the same experience on your smart device..
i remember during my college days..i got amazed with a technology called SPOT-smart personal object technology..which was an innitiative by Microsoft to infuse personalization across smart devices..like your household device..so to speak...a smart telephone or a smart refrigirator..i feel adobe's initiative is in line with this..but could have a larger impact as far as RIA in general and adobe's dominance in RIA is concerned.
Go RIA!!! :)

On Thu, May 1, 2008 at 6:31 PM, Dharmendra Tolani <dharmend...@gmail.com> wrote:

--
-saurabh narula
Evolving BI - the RIA way
http://saurabhnarula.wordpress.com